Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli

[Octafish]

Source: Reuters

By Patrick Lannin and Veronica Ek

STOCKHOLM Oct 5 (Reuters) - An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

Three decades after Daniel Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans.

Shechtman, 70, from Israel's Technion institute in Haifa, was working in the United States in 1982 when he observed atoms in a crystal he had made form a five-sided pattern that did not repeat itself, defying received wisdom that they must create repetitious patterns, like triangles, squares or hexagons.

"People just laughed at me," Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening "crusade" against him, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

SNIP...

"In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves."




Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/nobel-chemistry-idUSL5E7L54YA20111005

---

The moral: Never give up, even when others say it's woo.

[Enrique]

1. In your face, Linus Pauling!

i've always wanted to say that. :thumbsup:

[iandhr]

2. well done sir.

[naaman fletcher]

3. actually, the moral is:

never trust scientific "consensus". Most great scientists were way outside the norm of scientific thought.

[fascisthunter]

4. Huzzah! Congrats good man!(nt)

[provis99]

5. Linus Pauling always was a fluke.

The guy spent most of his time trying to argue that Vitamin C cures everything.

[eppur_se_muova]

17. Linus Pauling was hugely productive within his field of expertise ...

like too many very successful scientists -- especially Nobelists -- he decided he could equally well pass judgement on endeavors well outside his full understanding, such as medicine. Wiki Kary Mullis and Fred Hoyle for other illustrative examples.

I'm currently reading a history of modern chemistry which reveals the same weakness in many of the pioneers of chemistry -- Arrhenius, Nernst, Lewis, Langmuir (not all equally guilty).

[3waygeek]

6. Shechtman spends part of the year in the US....

where he's a professor of materials science at Iowa State.

[aquart]

7. How can it be regular or a pattern if it doesn't repeat?

Explain, please.

[TheMadMonk]

8. Penrose tiling. /nt

[struggle4progress]

16. Here's an example:

http://www.traipse.com/penrose_tiles/index.html

[eppur_se_muova]

18. It *almost* repeats, but not exactly.

A much better explanation is at the Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling


And here's how ancient craftsmen dealt with it:



http://broug.com/learn_5fold.htm

[DeSwiss]

9. K&R

http://www.answers.com/topic/quasicrystal"> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/05/1022985/-Chemistry-Nobel:-Quasicrystals-Israeli-Found-New-Form-of-Matter-Imagined-in-Islamic-Art?detail=hide&via=blog_2">

[xocet]

10. The moral: Never give up if you have empirical evidence. Woo never has credible evidence. n/t

[bigmonkey]

12. Empirical evidence is objectively verifiable as evidence.

"Credible" and "woo" are political characterizations. You're conflating two separate contexts.

[xocet]

19. Your comment transgresses certain so-called boundaries which have been long-vitiated by a "modern"

deconstruction of Bakhtin in the light of a less conservative hermeneutics which apparently you are still quite unwilling to use. You should note that separation of context is neither exactly absolute nor exactly relative modulo free objectivity. Instead, by superposition, free objectivity equilibrates the context.

Haven't you ever read Derrida or Habermas or Foucault for that matter?

[bigmonkey]

21. Attempted intimidation, and distraction.

That all you got?

[Kaleko]

22. You win

the contest for most pompously esoteric language fake-out in recent DU history.

Henceforth, your intellectual superiority has been established beyond a reasonable doubt.

Congrats!!!

[alp227]

11. Meth? n/t

[No Elephants]

13. Congrats. They laughed at Christopher Columbus, too. Or so the song lyrics say, anyway.

Small point, though: Isn't that "the Arab world," not "the Arabic world?"

"Arab" describes people of certain countries.

"Arabic" refers to a language spoken in those countries, as well as being the official language of a religion with adherents all over the world.

[Behind the Aegis]

14. "Arabic" is being used as a modifier.

It would be the same as saying "Arabic dress" or "Arabic food." Though, I believe both are correct usages.

[Little Tich]

15. Wow! This will sure give Technion a boost.

What we actually can do with the Shechtmanite remains to be seen, however.

[hunter]

20. This story reminds me very much of Barbara McClintock...

She stopped publishing her work in 1953 because other scientists were so skeptical of it. In 1983 she won the Nobel Prize for it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock